A few years ago, my mom mentioned that she wished we could be together for Chuseok, an important Korean celebration in the fall. It was September, and the kids had just started a new school year. I asked her to tell me about it, and she said it was a holiday where families took time off work to be together. They ate rice cakes, and children bowed to their elders and dressed in traditional hanbok to celebrate the fall harvest.
I peppered her with more questions, and soon I could tell she was overwhelmed and flustered by the amount of information I was asking for. I knew she wished I just understood, like a Korean daughter should, and yet I had no past experience to look back on.
It’s strange to rely on Google and DNA apps to understand who I am and who my ancestors are. When my mom doesn’t know how to describe something, I ask the Internet. It’s how I learned what I was supposed to do for my mom’s hwangap — her 60th birthday celebration. It’s how I found out that most of the Korean words I know are lullabies, phrases about passing gas, or ways to cuss someone out. It’s how I found maps to show my kids where their halmoni is from and how I found more Korean books and resources to learn things I feel I should already know.
And eventually, it’s how I learned to start celebrating Chuseok and what this holiday likely meant to my family in generations past.
Last year I drove to the nearest Korean grocery store on a cold October day. I was the only one in the store, aside from the store clerk. I went up and down the aisles, studying each of the products. I found songpyeon and other rice cakes and stared at the packaging, wondering how I was supposed to defrost the one that felt hard as rocks, and I spent five minutes trying to decide which kind of gochugaru I needed for making kimchi.
At the checkout, I placed the big bag of gochugaru, the containers of gochujang and doenjang, rice cakes, frozen pajeon, Kongnamul, shrimp crackers, and my favorite Nongshim…
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